TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books who will tell us about their new work as well as offer tips on writing, stories about the publishing biz, and from time to time, a recipe.
Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?
The subtitle of Drawing Breath gives a clear window
into what the book holds—Essays on Writing, the Body, and Loss. What it doesn’t
tell you, however, is that these essays were written over the span of 20+
years, making this collection a retrospective of sorts, a record of the
subjects I keep returning to over time, the steady pulses of
curiosity/obsession/devotion within my writing life.
Which essay did you most enjoy writing? Why? And which essay
gave you the most trouble, and why?
My 1999 essay, “Spelling” was so much fun to write and makes me
so happy every time I read it. It’s about my daughter teaching herself to write
as a little girl, and is one of the oldest essays in the book (and I’m
realizing I should write about joy more often if I have to look so far back to
find my most enjoyable piece! I’ve certainly had fun writing other things
since, but this one just felt like pure celebration.) My daughter is in her
late 20s now, and is a beautiful writer—I love how that same magic she had as a
child continues to sparkle through her. The hardest essay to write in the
collection was “Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying” from 2012 [see link below].
It was the first thing I had written that looked directly at my mom’s suicide,
and the process of getting it onto the page was excruciating. The experience of
publishing it was terrifying, too, at least at first, but the warm response the
piece received gave me courage to keep going to those hard places in my work.
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.
Since I didn’t have a book in mind as I wrote the essays within
it—I just wrote them as they came to me, and later pulled them together—the
presence of the book feels like a lovely surprise, an icing-on-the-cake book. I
feel like I have less ego-attachment to Drawing Breath than I do with
books I’ve wrestled with single-mindedly for years (even though perhaps there’s
more of me in this book than any other, since it does cover such a broad span
of time). When Drawing Breath was on submission, I found rejections
stung less than they usually do, and I feel like I can let this book journey
into the world without burdening it with expectation, maybe because most of
these essays have already been published, so I’ve survived the anxiety of those
being read publicly, and have received sweet support for them as individual
pieces. This is not to say I don’t feel any anxiety about the book release—of
course I do!—but it’s a less consuming anxiety than usual. A big high of this
process has been landing at Overcup Press—they’ve been a dream to work with
(and I have Liz Prato to thank for this…she had taken over the Overcup Twitter
feed—they had published her wonderful essay collection, Volcanoes, Palm
Trees, and Privilege: Essays on Hawai’i—and when I saw what they were
actively looking for, I realized Drawing Breath could be a good fit. I’m
grateful they agreed!)
What’s your
favorite piece of writing advice?
I return to Hélène Cixous’ advice all the time: “Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the
same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard.” I used the last two lines
of this as an epigraph for my 2002 craft book Fruitflesh: Seeds of
Inspiration for Women Who Write, and I use another Cixous quote for the
epigraph of Drawing Breath. “My body experiences, deep down inside, one
of its panicky cosmic adventures. I have volcanoes on my lands. But no lava:
what wants to flow is breath. And not just any old way. The breath ‘wants’ a
form. ‘Write me!’” (That quote isn’t advice, per se, but it resonates with my
experience. Clearly, Cixous speaks to me!) I’ve also held Audre Lorde’s
sentence “Your silence will not protect you” close to my writerly heart—it’s
guided me through some of my most difficult writing.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises
you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
I love this advice—surprise is one of my very favorite parts of
the writing process. As I noted earlier, the fact that my essays coalesced into
a book feels like a cool surprise in itself. In terms of surprise during the
writing process, I’m going to harken back to “Get Me Away From Here, I’m
Dying,” the essay I found the hardest to write. The essay has two parts—the
first part is about leaving my first marriage, and the second part is about my
mom’s suicide, and I thought the two parts were tied together only by the Belle
& Sebastian song I use as the title for this essay, since that song played
an important role during both time periods of my life. Then the last sentence
of the essay poured out of my fingers and tied the two parts together in a way
that surprised the hell out of me and brought me to tears, and I realized “Oh,
wow, this is what this essay is about.” My writing is way smarter than I
am.
How do you approach revision?
Revision was a wild process with this collection. I often tell my
students to set work aside for a while so you can see it freshly (because that
works!), but I usually don’t set work aside for 20 whole years and returning to
the older work was quite a trip. I noticed some writerly tics in those older
pieces that I needed to smooth out (an over-reliance on the word, “though”, for
example), and had to do quite a bit of tightening (including removing the
then-standard extra space after each period, which now looks like a big gaping
hole to me), but I was glad to see they mostly held up over time. Another
revision challenge: I’ll often return to the same stories over the course of
several essays, because I still have questions about the experience, or want to
approach the story from a new angle, or just can’t shake it from my system, and
I had to figure out how to remove repetition of information from one piece to
the next so the book wouldn’t become a hall of mirrors.
Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any
food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)
I adore reading and writing about food, but when I first pondered
this question—such a great question!—I couldn’t think of a single dish in the
book. Then I combed through the collection and found at least 40 food
references (including two discomfiting food “tangles”— “The tangle of shrimp,
glistening with butter, looked obscene, like an orgy in the shallow bowl” and
“a plate of what they called chow mein looked like a gray tangle of slime.”)
I’m not sure how I had forgotten there was so much food in the book, especially
since one of the essays is titled “Eating the Food of the Dead” and is about
the food my parents and my husband’s mother left behind after they died. Most
of the food in Drawing Breath has more emotional resonance than it does
any culinary sophistication, but I would be tickled if someone wanted to make
my dad’s favorite sandwich: Swiss cheese, mayonnaise, and bread and butter
pickles on toasted rye. Buzz sandwiches forever!
As far as more complex recipes go, I feel like I should give you
one for cookies, since cookies, I was tickled to discover, appear in four
different essays in the collection, and two of those feature thumbprint
cookies—some made by my former mother in law in one, my dad’s favorite
Pepperidge Farm variety in the other. I don’t think I would have noticed there
were two different thumbprint cookies in the book if you hadn’t asked this
question—thank you for the fun surprise/discovery! It feels apt to share a
recipe for this type of cookie because writing is like a thumbprint, isn’t it?
So unique to each writer’s own body/voice. I don’t think I’ve ever actually
made thumbprint cookies before (other than helping my beloved former mother in
law make hers), but I do want to try this recipe, which works with my various
dietary restrictions—https://simple-veganista.com/almond-flour-thumbprint-cookies/
. While both varieties of thumbprint cookies in the book are filled with
raspberry jam, I’d like to try the recipe writer’s suggestion to use lemon
infused olive oil and rosemary in the cookies, plus I’d add pine nuts instead
of the recommended almonds, since one of the most memorable batches of cookies
I've ever made were pine nut rosemary shortbread ones from a recipe I found in
the Los Angeles Times about twenty years ago (appropriate, given the vintage of
some of the essays in this collection). I can still smell and taste that
shortbread so vividly two decades later, and am excited to attempt this
variation of them soon. I’ll probably fill the thumbprints with a dairy free
lemon curd, like the one at https://minimalistbaker.com/vegan-lemon-curd/.
As apt as these cookies are, I’m realizing now that perhaps the
most fitting reference to food in the collection is the potluck dinner in my
essay “Ghosts in the Ecotone.” That essay takes place during a weekend writing
retreat, where all of us had brought dishes to share at a communal dinner, and
the table was heaped with all kinds of deliciousness. Drawing Breath is
a smorgasbord of sorts, itself—a smorgasbord of my writing, and also a
smorgasbord of voices other than my own, since I quote a large number of other
writers throughout Drawing Breath. I wanted to set a generous table with
this book, and hope readers leave feeling well-fed.
*****
READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: www.gaylebrandeis.com
ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://bookshop.org/p/books/drawing-breath-essays-on-writing-the-body-and-grief-gayle-brandeis/18582442?ean=9798985652710
READ AN ESSAY, “Get Me Away from Here, I’m Dying”: https://therumpus.net/2012/05/23/get-me-away-from-here-im-dying/